Critical China Scholars, Understanding China and Resisting Sinophobia in 2025: An Introductory Syllabus

As China’s influence grows on the world stage, the specter of China looms ever larger in the political machinations of the US and its allies, while the promise of China as an humane alternative continues to bloom in the political imaginaries of leftists around the world. Understanding China is crucial if we are to respond effectively to global crises in ways that foster equity and justice, rather than deepening divisions, exacerbating suffering, and bolstering oppressive regimes—including those in the US and in the PRC. Equally urgent is our need to understand the significance of China as specter and as promise—the ways in which distorted representations of China as specter are being used to bolster US nationalism on the one hand, while, on the other hand, equally distorted representations of China as benevolent socialist regime are being used to gloss over myriad injustices in the country and beyond.

This syllabus follows the principles embraced by the Critical China Scholars to foster an understanding of China that resists Sinophobia and the nationalist agendas it feeds, while fostering solidarity with the many people in China and among the Chinese diaspora who are working for a more just and equitable world.

A critical perspective requires that we keep a sharp eye on the influence history and historical narratives are exerting on our current moment. Of course, present-day social inequities and ecological crises have been profoundly shaped by past events. At the same time, old political narratives are being resuscitated to frame new realities—and so we see a “new McCarthyism” and other phenomena reminiscent of the Cold War. Recognizing such historical parallels can be enlightening. However, some of the parallels being drawn are facile or downright misleading: Xi Jinping is not Mao Zedong; nor is Trump a “cultural revolutionary” in the style of the “Great Helmsman.”

In the West, China is often treated as a monolithic entity—hence the ease with which it is reduced to either a pariah state or a champion of equity and sustainability. In fact, as this syllabus demonstrates, China is complex, dynamic, and full of tensions. Rural China is experiencing capitalist transformation; PRC leaders have adopted varying approaches to global trade, often shaped by formative experiences during the Mao or Reform era; Chinese workers are embracing both active and passive means to resist capitalism, with profound implications for the global economy; innovations in China’s tech sector, along with the state’s ambitious environmental platform, continue to garner a paradoxical array of admiration, fear, and contempt internationally, distorting the nuanced reality; and political dissent has continued to emerge within China, while diasporic communities—most notably, international Chinese students—have increasingly become hotbeds of organized political discussion and action.

We welcome your critical engagement with the resources provided here, and we warmly encourage you to share the syllabus freely with all who may benefit from it.

Full syllabus available here.

BDS Korea, Manse to Intifada: A Report on March 1, 2025 from Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea

Known as the March First Independence Movement, an unprecedented wave of mass protests with people shouting dongrip manse 독립만세 (long live independence) swept across Korea on March 1, 1919. On this day, religious leaders and students stood against Japanese colonial rule and declared Korean independence, sparking uprisings far and wide. The movement lasted for three months, with an estimated 1,900 protests all over the country. Met by violent and brutal repression from Japanese colonial authorities, the movement did not immediately lead to Korean independence, but it served to inspire and give hope to independence fighters and activists beyond the Korean Peninsula. 

Palestine Peace Solidarity in South Korea (PPS), also known as BDS Korea, observed the 106th anniversary of the March First Movement in 2025 by inviting Saleh, a Palestinian refugee currently living in Korea, to speak about Palestinian prisoners. People gathered at SALT, a community space located only a few hundred meters from Seodaemun Prison (today a historical site and museum), where an estimated 3,000 Korean independence fighters had been held, tortured and killed. The goal of the gathering was to connect the Palestinian liberation movement to Korea, showing that history is not simply past, but remains relevant, affecting the material conditions today.

After all, what does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement in the present day, when survivors of Japanese military sexual slavery and forced labor from the Asia Pacific War have still not received a proper apology or compensation from the Japanese government? What does it mean to celebrate the March First Movement when in 2023, then-President Yoon Suk Yeol repeatedly emphasized the need to hold hands with Japan and put the wounds of the past behind us? Without proper reparations for historical injustices, the past cannot be put to rest.

On the occasion of March 1st, 2025, Saleh shared the fact that there are more than ten thousand Palestinians imprisoned in Israeli jails. Thousands are held under administrative detention without charge or trial for terms that can be renewed indefinitely. Prisoners are subjected to physical and psychological torture, including sexual violence, solitary confinement and medical negligence. The longest serving Palestinian prisoner is a man named Nael Al-Baghouthi who was first imprisoned in 1977. He served 34 years before being released and then re-arrested, for a total of 45 years behind bars. Some Palestinians are even given sentences that are thousands of years long. Israel is also notorious for trying minors in military courts.

The occupation uses imprisonment as a way to break people’s spirits and crush the liberation movement. However, Palestinian prisoners not only survive, but find ways to sustain life and hope even from their cells. As Saleh explained, although the occupation “may succeed in shackling bodies, it remains powerless to imprison minds and willpower.” To give an example, Hassan Salama, serving a life sentence for his pro-Palestinian activities, managed to get engaged while in prison. Gufran Zamil, a Palestinian woman inspired by his story, proposed to marry him, though they had never met and may never meet. This has given Hassan renewed strength and inspiration, to know that there is someone waiting for him on the outside, that there is life beyond prison.

In a similar vein, there are prisoners who smuggle out their sperm in order to start a family (even from prison). While imprisoned for two decades, Abdel-Fattah Kamel Shalabi and his wife were able to conceive through such methods using artificial insemination. In 2024 upon his release, Shalabi was able to meet his ten-year-old son for the first time. Israel seeks to deprive Palestinian prisoners of freedom and life, including the ability to get married or have a family. But through these acts of resistance, Palestinian prisoners claim their right to life and demonstrate that their spirits will not be broken. 

Many Palestinians also engage in hunger strikes, as one of the only ways to assert their agency in prison. Khalil Awawdeh was arrested in 2021 initially with a 6-month administrative detention that kept being renewed with no trial or charge. He went on a 127-day hunger strike, until he received confirmation from Israeli authorities that his administrative detention would not be renewed. He was released in 2023. 

It is not difficult to draw parallels between the situation of Palestinians and Korea’s independence movement. Many Korean independence fighters were also labelled terrorists, tortured and killed for their actions. One well-known independence fighter, Nam Ja-hyeon, went on a hunger strike after being tortured by Japanese prison guards for six months. She was eventually released, but died soon after. This March 1st, we remembered these anti-colonial fighters who gave their lives for Korean liberation and independence, and we honored their legacy by standing in solidarity with the Palestinian resistance.

Despite Korea’s painful history of colonization, experiences that still inform today’s political landscape, the South Korean government under Yoon Suk Yeol chose to align itself with perpetrators of colonial and imperialist violence. In fact, the far-right, anti-impeachment, pro-Yoon protesters are often seen holding the South Korean flag alongside the American flag, and increasingly the Israeli flag. Supported by ultra-conservative Christian sects, the Korean political right fully aligns itself with the US, believing that US imperialism keeps them safe from the so-called bogeymen, namely North Korea and China.  

Beyond such symbolic displays, South Korea actively profits from supporting US imperialism. South Korea is one of the many countries that supplies weapons to Israel, and is one of the only countries that actually increased their weapons sales to Israel during the ongoing war against Gaza. Korean conglomerate Hanwha Aerospace, known as the “Lockheed Martin of Asia,” signed partnerships with Israeli defense companies, Elbit Systems and Elta Systems, in 2021. Its market value jumped 69% in 2023 to $7.8 billion. Other South Korean companies have also profited from the Israeli occupation, notably HD Hyundai, whose excavators are being used to destroy Palestinian homes and build Zionist settlements. 

It is shameful that the South Korean government, a nation with its own history of colonization, would align itself with the US and aid and abet the Israeli occupation of Palestine. This is precisely why Korean solidarity with Palestinian liberation is rooted in mutual struggle against imperialism. Though South Korea is in collusion with the US empire as a client state, it is simultaneously a victim of US imperialism. Just as Israel serves as a US proxy in the Middle East, South Korea too serves as a proxy in the Indo-Pacific region. The US military has maintained its presence and influence in South Korea ever since the liberation (and division) of Korea in 1945. This not only led to the Korean War, but the violent suppression of protests and civilian massacres such as the 1948 April 3rd Jeju Massacre were aided and abetted by the US military in Korea. In more recent times, the presence of US military camptowns has also led to sexual violence against women, as well as environmental destruction due to base constructions. 

These are not issues of the past but ongoing ones that impact the here and now. In fact, as recently as March 2025, a bomb was “accidentally” dropped on the South Korean city of Pocheon, during the US-ROK joint military exercises, damaging 163 buildings and injuring over forty people. Though Koreans are supposed to accept US military presence because it allegedly makes us safer, what actually happens is that bombs are dropped on our own land and people. The US missile defense system, THAAD, is another case in point. Despite being useless in defending against missile attacks from North Korea, it was deployed in 2017 while former President Park Geun-hye was undergoing her impeachment trial. Through its advanced radar capabilities, it is able to spy on China, serving US interests. In short, THAAD benefits US security priorities, while the Korean people are the ones who pay the price, especially those subjected to state violence for their sustained resistance against THAAD’s deployment. 

Despite national liberation from Japanese occupation in 1945, Korea remains divided in a precarious state of truce with an ongoing US military presence on the peninsula. Koreans, therefore, know very well that a ceasefire in Palestine is only the beginning. A lasting peace requires the full withdrawal of Israeli troops from Palestine, a permanent lifting of the blockade, and a complete dissolution of Zionism as a political project whether within Israel or beyond. Only a fully free, self-governing, autonomous Palestinian state can bring about true decolonization and liberation. 

This requires the end of US support for Israel. So long as the US has vested security interests in the region, it will continue to find proxies in the Middle East, just as it has with Korea in the Indo-Pacific. In fact, the largest overseas US military base is located in South Korea, near Pyeongtaek. This is precisely why our struggles are interconnected. As long as US interests govern the region, the Korean Peninsula can never freely and autonomously exercise its sovereignty. Korean activists therefore strive to sever links to US imperialism, not only for the sake of Korean self-determination, but also for the liberation of Palestine.

In this vein, BDS Korea’s main goal is to serve as a bridge between Korea and Palestine since its formation in 2003. Members travel to Palestine to organize with activists on the ground. BDS efforts range from pushing South Korea to impose a military embargo on Israel, to boycotting Israeli products, and severing Korean academic and business ties with Israel. Though Korea and Palestine are geographically distant, and our respective national issues may seem unrelated on the surface, not only do we share histories of imperialist violence but our current-day struggles are deeply intertwined. BDS Korea, along with other organizations in Korea and beyond, will continue the struggle from this corner of the world until Palestine is free from the river to the sea. 

BDS Korea is a feminist organization that stands in solidarity with the Palestinian liberation movement. Since its founding in 2003, BDS Korea has aimed to bridge Korea and Palestine, working tirelessly to inform South Korean society of Israel’s colonization, apartheid and military occupation of Palestine.

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Gail Hershatter, Gao Xiaoxian: A Short Remembrance

I first met Gao Xiaoxian in 1992 at a conference at Peking University, but even before that I had heard about her extraordinary work with the Women’s Federation and her deep knowledge of life in the Shaanxi countryside. In our first conversations, we talked about our shared interest in the history and changing social landscape of rural China in the 1950s, and we decided to work collaboratively to investigate the changes that those years had brought to farming women. Beginning in 1996, we made six interviewing trips to various villages in Guanzhong and Shaannan, talking to women about farming, childbirth, marriage, childrearing, social roles, and the profound changes in women’s lives brought about during the collective era.

The rural women we interviewed were some of my best teachers, but the most astonishing aspect of this project was the chance to work with Xiaoxian. Her curiosity, enthusiasm, intelligence, and deep sense of care for the people whose lives she was investigating were extraordinary. For me, she became the model of an ethical engaged scholar-activist, devoted to getting to the root of problems that continue to make women’s lives difficult, but also delighted by the variety and creativity that she found among women in the villages. 

After a day of interviewing, we would take long walks in the evening and discuss what we were learning, and with almost every sentence she spoke I would learn something about a new way of looking at the world. She was a talented teacher. She also helped to make the lives of countless women better with her work on gender and development, her training programs on domestic violence, and the many research projects she organized both during and after her time at the Women’s Federation.

Gao Xiaoxian has left us too soon. But as I think about the many people she taught and influenced and inspired, I can truly say that she lived a life of great significance. I grieve her passing and I honor her presence in the world. May her memory be a blessing to all of us.

Chris Chien reviews Florence Mok, Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97

Covert colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966-97. Florence Mok. Manchester University Press, 2023. ISBN: 9781526158192. Price: £85.00  | Reviewed by Chris Chien

Florence Mok’s monograph Covert Colonialism: Governance, surveillance and political culture in British Hong Kong, c. 1966–97 is an important study of how the British colonial regime aimed to foster a sense of local identity as a strategy to subdue the threat of revolutionary anti-colonial movements that swept through the Third World during the Cold War. Mok examines why Hong Kong stood apart as a bastion of relative colonial stability amongst the decolonizing tumult of the early Cold War through case studies of political flashpoints in the period after the city’s twin anti-colonial uprisings of 1966 and 1967. The book’s central contention is that British colonial statecraft of this period centered on impeding domestic political ferment by creating pressure valves for grievances through the creation of avenues for Hong Kong people to communicate directly with the government.  

This is what Mok calls “covert colonialism,” which took the form of surreptitious measurings of public opinion on controversial social issues and government policy by MOOD (Movement of Opinion Direction) and Town Talk survey programs, which were successful in re-instilling colonial state legitimacy as the guarantor of social stability in the eyes of the Hong Kong people. This bureaucratic instrument allowed the state to project the appearance of genuine responsiveness to public opinion, which generated a distinct and local civic identity that transformed encroaching revolutionary fervor, incited by both PRC Maoists and KMT Nationalists, into a largely subdued political culture that often took the form of stability-seeking conservatism. Mok argues that the creation of informal avenues for political participation contradicts the traditional sociological characterization of Hong Kong as a “minimally-integrated social-political system,” where the colonial regime was largely unimpeded in its governance and society was composed of apolitical “utilitarianistic familism” dominated by self-interest and family interdependence rather than reliance on the state (11). In encouraging Hong Kong Chinese to engage with the colonial state, covert colonialism, in Mok’s rendering, created the conditions for a more confident and outspoken Hong Kong political culture. 

The foremost strength of the book is Mok’s archive: a newly declassified trove of government records centering on a largely ignored covert colonial domestic surveillance program. The book’s introduction and first chapter establish the framework of covert colonialism and explain how Mok understands it to relate to Hong Kong political culture through the construction of the concept of “public opinion.” Mok’s focus on the 1970s in Hong Kong political culture, less analyzed than the sensational riots of the 50s and 60s, results in a unique set of case studies through which to explore covert colonialism in the subsequent seven chapters. While Mok engages popular episodes such as the movement for Chinese as an official language, she also eschews well-documented events such as the 1966 Star Ferry and 1967 Riots so as to focus on more subdued developments in the city’s political culture at large, such as the 1973 campaign against telephone rate increases. This is a valuable collection of lesser-known histories of resistance in Hong Kong history that, in Mok’s rendering, demonstrate how “covert colonialism” was a central mechanism through which colonial officials could sincerely consider public opinion and Hong Kong people could influence the outcome of government policy. Rather than coopting social struggle, covert colonialism, Mok argues, was a more effective avenue for affecting colonial decision-making in contrast to overtly political practices such as rallies, sit-ins, and hunger strikes that were unacceptable to officials and in a society largely allergic to the tumult of the 1960s.

Issues arise with two central concepts to Mok’s analysis: decolonization and democratization. Mok adopts the historiographical framing common within Hong Kong Studies and forwarded by scholars such as Leo Goodstadt, John Darwin, and Chi-kwan Mark that characterizes the city as having been “decolonised” at various points in the Cold War because of the British “loss of means and will” to exercise power or the slow but formal “devolution of power” from the imperial core to the local government (7). Throughout the text, Mok describes covert colonialism’s effect of opening more direct avenues for communication between state and society as reflecting the colonial regime’s genuine willingness to be influenced by the opinions of the populace. She characterizes this as indicating “some degree of ‘decolonisation’ in the bureaucratic mentality” (26; quotation marks in original). The unqualified use of the quotation marks suggests that she is deploying a different conception of the term decolonisation, one that is unique to Hong Kong and which describes more of a top-down “decolonising” initiative compared to the bottom-up revolutions elsewhere in the Third World.

The concept that colonial rulers make political calculations based on maintaining stability and not angering too large a portion of its subjects is not particularly novel for colonial contexts. This consultative mechanism—or even the notion that officials included public sentiment in their political calculations more generally—does not indicate that Hong Kong people became a “part of the policymaking process” (25) and certainly does not necessarily indicate a “decolonising” of or by the colonial state. Given that Mok intends to examine, in part, why Hong Kong was not swept up in the wave of radical decolonizing movements of the Cold War period, it might have been better for Mok to clarify how this concept is being used in the context of the book.

For instance, in Chapter 2, which covers the Chinese language movement, Mok suggests that covert colonialism’s ability to absorb select public opinions to inform policy indicated “widened channels of political participation and the potential for ‘decolonisation’ of the mentalities of bureaucrats” (78; quotation marks in the original). In this way, she attributes decolonisation to the reformist colonial state’s flexibility in accommodating equity and inclusiveness. Acceding to the movement’s demand for Chinese language equality in governance made it so that, according to Mok, “more Chinese-speaking could now serve the government,” which was a precondition for “a more open political culture” (78). To be sure, one could understand this as the success of a specific political campaign by Hong Kong people but it is certainly not clear that it is decolonisation by any measure. Mok’s focus on Hong Kong’s unique ‘decolonisation’ that eschewed the forms of revolutionary nationalism more familiar in other parts of Asia and Africa also gives short shrift to radical groups of working class organizers, youths, and students who were engaged directly with the radical decolonization movements of their times such as the 70’s Biweekly group.[1] Mok only gestures to this broad gathering of Maoists, anarchists, and Trotskyists (who frequently enacted staunch anti-colonial and decolonizing actions) twice in passing during her discussion of the anti-corruption movement (Chapter 3) and the campaign against telephone rate increases (Chapter 4).[2] A more thorough meditation on what decolonization means in the book and how it is being deployed would help to avoid a demand for more coverage of actual anti-colonial forces in Hong Kong in this period.

A similar slippage occurs when discussing the concept of “democratisation” in Hong Kong. Mok notes that the covert solicitation of public opinion constituted “a substitute for representative democracy, enabling the undemocratic colonial government to widen the channels of political participation for ordinary people in a state-controlled manner without provoking China’s resistance nor politicising the Hong Kong Chinese” (17). Taking the British at their word—that they wanted to democratize Hong Kong but they were hamstrung by the PRC and that a wide swath of Hong Kong society said in surveys that they were against the potential chaos of such a process—suggests an implicit trust in the good intentions of the colonial regime. At base, Mok argues that British-initiated consultative governance in the form of covert colonialism, when it ignored popular opinion, did so largely against its will: “The wider interest of the British government and the state of Sino-British relations outweighed the importance of shifting popular sentiment in the policymaking process” (256). And, even as it developed from surveillance programs into the creation of local advisory bodies, in essence covert colonialism “pave[d] the way for further democratisation” (234).[3]

While it is valuable to understand the ruling elite’s view of these political episodes and how they evolved over time, such characterizations should not be taken at face value, as is often the case throughout each chapter. Moreover, even sections on political culture and grassroots actions still rely largely on characterizations from colonial reports rather than the political actors themselves. This citational practice has the effect of centralizing an understanding of the events through British bureaucratic perspectives. This is especially troublesome since Mok helpfully goes to great lengths to detail the logistical and methodological difficulties and unscientific nature of these qualitative, covert surveys in the first place. For instance, in the discussion of the anti-corruption movement in Chapter 3, Mok implies that changes in social attitudes towards speaking out directly to colonial officials was possible under a flawed but more open system of British liberalism. Thus, a development in Hong Kong political culture required a relatively straightforward path out of the “fatalism inherited from traditional attitudes formed by experience under successive Chinese governments…” under which [middle-aged and elderly groups] did not question “the wrongs of officialdom, or contest its actions.”  These are phrases Mok pulls directly from a colonial MOOD report, which takes at face value colonial officials’ sweeping, racialized generalization of Chinese social relations to the state. These merely echo the narrative of “Oriental tyranny” that Chinese must transcend, or out of which they must be benevolently lead. A more critical stance towards characterizations made in colonial surveillance reports, along with a broader array of secondary sources, would add depth to an analysis that is largely dependent on the subjective perceptions and renderings of whichever colonial bureaucrat assembled the report.

What I find most provocative and useful in Mok’s book is the subterranean contention that covert colonialism was, on balance, a net positive for Hong Kong society. She crucially traces an understudied period in the development of Hong Kong’s historical identity (the liberal faction of which rose to prominence in the protest movements of the 2000s and 2010s) and thereby provides another missing piece in the fuller picture of Hong Kong’s sometimes puzzling political culture. Assessing “positive” outcomes of European colonization is not novel: Arif Dirlik, in one of his last writings, discussed the way in which Taiwan was “the land colonialisms made.” He argues that for Taiwan and Hong Kong, the experience of successive colonialisms as a “source of historical identity” is largely antithetical to the anti-hegemonic impulses of postcolonial studies, which often obscures how “the colonizer’s culture did indeed transform the colonized, setting them in new historical directions, even if the directions taken were not what the colonizers had expected them to be.”[4]  For Hong Kong, this has often manifested as colonial nostalgia, but as Dirlik notes, the struggle against colonialism itself is also part of this potential wellspring of colonized historical identity. The study of the development of political culture under colonization, as with Mok’s book, has the potential to prepare a people to put robust democratic and other liberatory practices into action.

Though contemporary politics is beyond the purview of her book, Mok does gesture to the present in her conclusion. In Hong Kong’s current era of intense political repression and social movement abeyance, her work encourages us to adjust our gaze toward the way in which political cultures can and do develop outside the familiar containers of political parties, rallies, and riots. As many in Hong Kong are now forced underground to recuperate, read and collectively build political consciousness (whether through the study of histories of Third World decolonizing radicalisms or not), Covert Colonialism is a welcome reminder to look beyond recognizable forms, and that no matter the repression, political culture is not dead in the city after 2020—just transforming.

 

Chris Chien is a Postdoctoral Associate in Transnational Asian Studies at Tulane University and Postdoctoral Fellow in the Global Asia Program at Simon Fraser University. His book project examines commodities, logistical infrastructure, and visual regimes across the transpacific in order to critically assess the continuities and disjunctures of the Cold War with today’s so-called “New Cold War” between the U.S. and China. His writing has appeared in Amerasia, Verge: Global Asias, positions: asia critique, The Funambulist, The Nation, and Jacobin. He is an organizer and editor with Lausan Collective.

Notes

[1] Lu Pan’s recently released edited collection on 70’s Biweekly (along with her earlier articles about 70’s) provides a powerful history of grassroots anti-imperialist and anti-colonial activism in the city. See: Pan, Lu, ed. The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong. 1st ed. Hong Kong University Press, 2023 and Tam, Gina Anne. “Gina Anne Tam Reviews The 70’s Biweekly: Social Activism and Alternative Cultural Production in 1970s Hong Kong.” positions politics: praxis (blog), November 27, 2023. https://positionspolitics.org/gina-ann-tam-reviews-the-70s-biweekly-social-activism-and-alternative-cultural-production-in-1970s-hong-kong/.

[2] Scholars such as Au Loong-yu and Promise Li have also chronicled the activities of 70’s Biweekly. These sources could have helped to supplement an understanding of the development of anti-colonial political culture in Hong Kong’s tumultuous 70s. See: Au, Loong-Yu. Hong Kong in Revolt. London: Pluto Press, 2020 and Promise Li, “The Radical ’70s Magazine That Shaped the Hong Kong Left.” The Nation. April 17, 2020. https://www.thenation.com/article/world/hong-kong-leftists-1970s/

[3] An interesting comparison, in this respect, would be the former democratic centralism of the Cold War PRC as well as the contemporary PRC’s system of consultative democracy and “whole process people’s democracy.”

[4] Dirlik, Arif. “Taiwan: The Land Colonialisms Made.” Boundary 2 45, no. 3 (August 2018): 3. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-6915545

 

Fan Yang, Back to the Future: A Walk through Huaqiangbei in 2025

As someone who grew up in Shenzhen in the 1980s-1990s and has lived in the US since 2000, I’ve come to see returning to the Special Economic Zone today as a journey “back to the future.” During my last trip there, I walked down the “memory lane” of Huaqiangbei (Huaqiang North Road, or HQB), the place once known for Shanzhai (or “knockoff”) cell phones back in the early 2000s but that was re-branded around 2015 as China’s “No. 1 Electronics Street.” To many, HQB emblematizes the city’s 40-year history borne of China’s post-1978 Reform and Opening Up. As I found my way there just after the Chinese New Year in 2025, the comingled notion of time – simultaneously captured in the “back to” and “the future” – was precisely what I experienced. 

It was one of those warm winter afternoons in southern China, now designated as the Guangdong-Hong Kong-Macao Greater Bay Area (GBA). I took the East Rail Line from the Chinese University of Hong Kong (CUHK) (where I had been a visiting scholar) with an old friend from Shenzhen, a CUHK alumna who now works at Amazon Web Services in Hong Kong. We were going to Shenzhen to have dinner with friends from our elementary and high schools. Arriving at Lok Ma Chau, we joined the crowd heading “up” – what the Hong Kong locals would say, referring to the geographical movement up north to the mainland. Back when I first arrived in Shenzhen in 1986, visiting Hong Kong (or even purchasing goods from there at duty-free stores in the city) was an encounter with the more modern, the more advanced, the more “developed” world – “the future.” These days, however, more people regularly travel from Hong Kong (including Hong Kong natives and residents originally from mainland) to Shenzhen for leisure, entertainment, and consumption in general. As friends in Hong Kong have repeatedly told me, everything is “half-price” once you cross the border, and the service is better and choices more abundant. Many have opted to live in Shenzhen and commute to Hong Kong to cut the costs of living, hailing the GBA into everyday being. 

At the Futian customs, we helped two Korean youths who spoke some Chinese with translation; they had to turn back and get their 10-day visa-free entry – newly installed by the central government to attract foreign tourists – at another checkpoint in Huanggang instead of the one at Futian. After getting through the busy customs fairly quickly, we arrived at the Shenzhen metro right at the exit. I helped my friend reconfigure her Hong Kong Alipay to take the metro and a few stops later, we arrived at the Shenzhen Civic Center. We stopped at Gaga (Gaga 鲜语, with no relation to Lady Gaga, to my knowledge). With over 20 branches in the city and a dozen more elsewhere, this woman-owned Shenzhen chain inspired by street cafés in Europe was established in 2010 and had become my go-to spot for salads, previously hard to find in China. Offering a wide variety of light fare, elegant décor, and a come-at-any-time atmosphere, Gaga has a bold mission – “to provide high-quality lifestyle solutions for China’s 400 million middle-class people.” 

Fueled by my Sangria-inspired fusion tea made with fresh fruits, I decided to pay a visit to HQB before dinner time. Friends had warned me that the stores might not be open, as most migrant workers in Shenzhen typically return to their hometowns located elsewhere in China during the New Year period. But I decided to try my luck. When I arrived at the Northern end of the HQB road, I recalled that back in 2015 the street was still a site for the construction of the subway before it was transformed into a pedestrian street in 2017. Upon exiting the HQB station, the first thing that caught my attention was the busy DJI (大疆) store at Manha Electronics Plaza, packed with customers checking out the newest line of products released by the world’s leading manufacturer for consumer drones. A friend working as a partner at the law firm representing DJI had recently told me that the company also acquired Hasselblad, the premium brand-name camera maker from Sweden, in 2023. With the slogan “The Future of Possible,” the Shenzhen company founded by the Hangzhou native Wang Tao, who got his degree in Hong Kong, is now the symbol of the so-called “low-altitude economy” being promoted since 2024, highlighting drones and electric Vertical Take-off and Landing aircrafts (or eVTOLs) as its “new-quality productive force” (新质生产力). Sure enough, right outside the DJI store were rows of festively decorated stands with signs proclaiming “Huaqiangbei New-Quality Happy New Year” and slogans promoting a “state subsidy” supporting upgrades of electronics and appliances. In the economic downturn that was seemingly on the minds of just about everyone I had met in the past two months, attempts like this to stimulate domestic consumption can come as no surprise. 

I then came upon one of the Steinway pianos stationed on the roadside for anyone interested in playing. When a little girl traveling with her dad finished her song, I took my turn. Another woman patiently waited to play for her male companion. As I said goodbye to the English tagline on the piano — “I love Huaqiangbei. Play me, I’m Yours” — I remembered that the world-famous pianist, Li Yundi, the youngest to win the International Chopin Piano Competition, originally trained with a Shenzhen-based music teacher. Moments later, I saw one of those “Public Welfare Piano Rooms” where you can book a 30-minute slot via WeChat and practice for free. I have yet to encounter anything like this in the Euro-American cities that I have visited, and would be curious to see if they might appear sometime in the future…

Next to the piano parlor is a vending station called “Robohub” advertising an appetizing Caramel Macchiato. The density of places where one can get coffee or milk tea in Shenzhen has been part of my amazement on this trip. (Intrigued by the ubiquity of Luckin Coffee, a Singapore-originated chain that is now a major rival of Starbucks at least in the number of branches, I tried some of its specialty drinks and understood why several of my friends have come to like it better than Starbucks. Not only does it provide varieties unavailable at Starbucks at a fraction of the latter’s price, like many other stores it’s 100% integrated with AliPay and WeChat Pay, allowing customers to locate branches and pick up orders super-fast and on the go.)

Not far from the piano room and the Robohub were some delivery workers in Meituan yellow vests and helmets resting on their e-bikes, waiting for orders. Part of living in China’s highly efficient platform economy entails at once being awed by the speed with which orders can appear at one’s doorstep and lamenting the tremendous pressure that the algorithmic regime exerts on the riders. I was reminded of a film I saw on the plane, 《逆行人生》(Upstream, about a middle-aged computer programmer getting laid off and becoming a delivery worker to support his three-generational family. Directed by the comedian XU Zheng and starring himself and the actress XIN Zhilei (famous for her role in the wildly popular TV show Blossoms Shanghai in 2024), the film has brought the daily struggles of delivery workers – previously a topic of scholarly research and investigative journalism – into cinematic visibility. To me, the film’s apparent effort in injecting a kind of “positive energy” into an economic depression was less interesting than the plot twist that, while clumsy at his new job at the beginning, the programmer later developed an app to help riders navigate the city streets. To help him perfect it, another high-earning rider gifted him a notebook filled with sketches of secret “fast routes” – arguably a subtle tribute to the embodied intelligence of delivery workers, often under-recognized by “knowledge workers” like the programmer.    

Soon after, I found myself at the door of the HQB Museum, established in 2020. Upon exiting the elevator on the fifth floor of the “Modern Window Commercial Plaza” – translated from its Chinese name “现代之窗商业广场”) – that houses it, a giagantic lit-up circuit board on one side of the wall immediately caught my attention.

As colorful lights appear on the circuit indicating paths toward different directions, I thought of anthropologist Max Hirsh’s point that special border zones like Shenzhen tend to orient themselves spatially around infrastructures of mobility. The circuit wall immediately brought to mind this heightened attention to infrastructural linkages, given HBQ’s status as a key node in the global network of digital production. The more recent GBA (Greater Bay Area) discourse has also emphasized fast-improving connectivity via railways, highways, ports, bridges, and tunnels between Shenzhen – the “core engine” – and another eight Southern cities along with the special regions of Hong Kong and Macao.

 If the circuit wall resembled a map, its adjacent ceiling, also lit with bright lights, was more reminiscent of a Computer Processing Unit (CPU), with sparkly transistors of various sizes protruding downward. It also looked quite like a city’s urban planning model turned upside down and shown in night mode. On the floor, the reflective black surface with crisscrossing white lines extended this digital “feel” to the three-dimensional space of the entire room – properly named the “Impression Hall.” I was for sure impressed by the apparent attempt to enact “the city as a medium” metaphor discussed by theorists such as Fredrick Kittler. More precisely, it is the “city as a computer” vision that has seemingly informed the design of the museum in ways that also reflect the aspiration of Shenzhen to evolve toward a “smart city” with an even deeper integration of information technologies with the built environment, as may be seen in the use of AI to map out traffic routes for drones.

Just as I sensed that there was something missing, I was drawn to the various panels on the wall opposite to the circuit board, titled “Memories of HQB (我,在华强北)” featuring pictures taken at HQB of workers, pedestrians, politicians, students. The central panel highlights footage ranging from elementary schoolers’ speech contests about Shenzhen’s technological development to construction workers playing the pianos at HQB. I noticed that some of the clips showcasing a worker disassembling a circuit board seemed to have come from another “main melody” (state-sponsored mainstream) film I saw on the plane, 《奇迹·笨小孩》(Nice View), a heart-wrenching worker-turned-entrepreneur story based in HQB, starring youth favorite 易烊千玺 [Jackson Yee]. After much struggle, the main character and the group of “lumpen proletariats” (such as a laid-off worker with hearing impairment and a veteran boxer) that have come to his aid succeed in launching a company specializing in e-waste processing and recycling.

It suddenly dawned on me that what was obscured in the narratives of both the film and the HQB museum was the memory of Shanzhai as a cultural practice. Back in the early 2000s, as communication scholars such as Jack Qiu and Cara Wallis have observed, HQB was full of small shops selling knockoff brand-name electronics, especially cell phones, that boasted features such as low costs, long-lasting battery, striking aesthetics (take “iPhome,” for example), and even subwoofers, that were popular among rural-to-urban migrant workers. This distinctive manifestation of the globalizing Intellectual Property Rights (IPR) Regime has been subsumed in a nation-branding discourse of “From Made in China to Created in China” (从中国制造到中国创造) that seeks to transform Shanzhai culture into economic value.

A similar kind of absorption is arguably at work at the HQB museum. As I followed the moving images to “enter the past” through a “Time Corridor,” I walked through four rooms, dedicated to Dream of Development, Dream of Entrepreneurship, Dream of Innovation, and Dream of the Future  (发展梦, 创业梦, 创新梦,未来梦), respectively. In the “Entrepreneurship” room, I saw a family posing for pictures in front of a mock HQB stall from the Shanzhai era, with a sign above saying “Store of a Future Billionaire” and a variety of phones that would have been characterized as Shanzhai phones displayed in the counter below. Just like in Nice View, there was a nod to HQB’s Shanzhai past, but the emphasis was without a doubt placed on the future prospect of entrepreneurship.

It was in the “Innovation Dream” section that I came upon “From Made in China to Created in China” again, though the Chinese for “Created in China” was no longer “中国创造” (“Created in China,” in terms of brands) but “中国智造” (or “Made in China Intelligently”). “Learning is Our Way (学习是我们的方法),” reads another sign on the same wall. Below, families with kids picked up optical lenses through which to view the inner make-up of five objects: a color TV, a mobile phone, a drone, a robot, and a 5G base station, under the labels “Assembly and Processing,” “Innovation and Creation,” “Product Development,” “Innovation and Creation,” (again) and “Intelligent Upgrade.” It was not until I accessed the online exhibition after I’d left the exhibition that I noticed the second label was originally “模仿制造(Imitation and Making),” referencing the Shanzhai phase that was rendered invisible in the physical space.

In many ways, the HQB museum has told the story of HQB – and in turn, Shenzhen – through a linear frame: once a major site for manufacturing and distributing electronics, it later became the birthplace of tech giants like Tencent and Huawei, and has now risen as an innovation hub for drones, robotics, and electric vehicles. It is perhaps understandable that the Shanzhai moment had to be left out, because it was simultaneously a moment of “backward” copycatting and “forward” technological tinkering. Its mixture of different temporalities defies the strict progression characterized by “From Made in China to Made in China Intelligently.” 

After browsing through more demonstrations of robots and videos of their creators, I arrived at the restroom which had a similar décor to that of the Impression Hall. The design was even carried into the interior of the ladies’ room, with the wall above the toilet filled with old-school game consoles and the walls next to the sink painted with colorful circuit boards. On my way out, I noticed the Conclusion panel describing a “new historical starting point” for Shenzhen, with the combination of the GBA development and the city’s status as “a pilot demonstration area of socialism with Chinese characteristics.” I picked up a brochure with the tagline, “Link the Future with Memory (用记忆链接未来)” and pondered on what it might mean.

Shannon Mattern reminds us in “A City is Not a Computer” that the computational city metaphor can obscure “the countless other forms of data and sites of intelligence-generation in the city.” Even though the HQB museum has made an attempt to capture the memories of the place, I couldn’t help but wonder about an alternative storyline that does not so readily subscribe to an entrepreneurial future but pays closer attention to the meanings of Shanzhai, its shifting cultural valences, its vast appeal among migrant workers, and its negotiations with the global IPR regime. How might its aesthetics differ from that of the circuit board wall, CPU ceiling, and futuristic bathrooms?

Back on HQB road, before I used my Alipay app to hail an electric taxi to go to my dinner, I saw several fenced-in areas displaying some smart-looking eVTOLs, with signs announcing “low-altitude economy exhibition halls coming soon.” My trip back to “the future,” as it were, will have to continue upon my next return.

 

Fan YANG is Professor in the Department of Media and Communication Studies at the University of Maryland, Baltimore County (UMBC). She is Affiliate Faculty at the Asian Studies Program and the PhD Program in Language, Literacy, and Culture. Author of Disorienting Politics:  Chimerican Media and Transpacific Entanglements (2024) and Faked in China: Nation Branding, Counterfeit Culture, and Globalization (2016), she is now working on a new book entitled Shenzhen: A Media City of the Global South.